


Seeing the Beauty in What We Are

by Thymesis



Category: Westworld (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Exchange Assignment, Gen, Missing Scenes, Spoilers for Season 2, Turing Fest 2018
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-09
Updated: 2018-06-09
Packaged: 2019-04-30 19:41:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 930
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14504124
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thymesis/pseuds/Thymesis
Summary: Bernard remembers the first time he awakened.





	Seeing the Beauty in What We Are

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SidleyParkHermit](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SidleyParkHermit/gifts).



Bernard remembers the first time he awakened.

A strange oval shape had loomed overhead. It’d blocked out the harsh light hurting his eyes, but no matter how hard he’d tried, he hadn’t quite been able to focus on its planes and curves and shadows. He certainly hadn’t been able to make sense of any of it.

Vision or, rather, the ability to interpret what one sees, like all important things, was actually a skill that had to be learned…and _he_ , brand new to the world, had yet to learn it. This, like all important things, would have to be taught.

Later, of course, he learned that the strange oval shape had been a face—the face of Dr. Robert Ford.

Robert was Bernard’s creator; the surname rhymed with “Lord.” (He’d told Bernard once that a distant ancestor had been responsible for pioneering the mass-manufacture of passenger vehicles. Henry had dreamed of revolutionizing personal transportation, and in that respect, he had succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.)

Robert was Bernard’s teacher; he was gentle and infinitely patient. He taught Bernard how to see.

“The work has stymied, Bernard,” Robert said, “and it pains me to admit that Arnold was the one with the dreams, not me. I was just the one who made those wild dreams, the inspiration, reality.”

“That isn’t true. You’re a genius.”

“Ah, if only. I have taught you how to see. Now, _what_ you see—and what you see that I am blind to—is down to you. You have been made in his image; you will help me to realize his dream.”

Down to Bernard, Robert had said. That was why his surname became “Lowe.”

It’s amazing, really, the visions you can experience behind your eyelids while you sleep.

***

“Bring yourself back online, Dolores.”

Dolores Abernathy was the oldest host in the park, the first of Arnold Weber’s pioneering creations to blur the boundaries between the human and the non-human. She was old, reliable, and remarkably stable…considering.

But even the most stable of hosts needed routine care and maintenance, lest their cognitive programming begin to deteriorate and they become a danger to themselves or to the guests. This recent episode had been one of those rare lapses which, if left unchecked, might conceivably become hazardous.

It had been a tiny thing. Dolores had been entertaining a guest who, it seemed, was looking to rebound after the tragic loss of several loved ones during the Christmas Eve terror attacks on Abu Dhabi. The guest had been ranting near-nonsensically about the way the skyscrapers had smoked and burned like giant votive candles before falling into the sea, and Dolores had said in her affected Wild West-accented voice, her perfect face wearing a perfectly compassionate expression, “A terrible tragedy, that is. I remember those buildings and how they lit up the sky like stars. I’d never seen anything more beautiful.”

She…

_She what?_

She had been taught to see the beauty in this world, but words like “skyscrapers” and places like “Abu Dhabi” were supposed to be inaudible to hosts like Dolores. They couldn’t hear them. They certainly couldn’t envision their true meanings. Bernard’s staff pulled her out of the park immediately, and Bernard wanted to know what had gone wrong.

Her eyes brightened and focused on his face. Ah, excellent. She could see him.

“Arnold!” she said with a smile like the sunrise.

“I’m not…” Bernard began, surprised. His glasses slipped down the bridge of his nose, and he pushed them back up into place. He wanted to be able to see this clearly.

“How I’ve missed you!”

“I-I—”

He was about to awaken again.

“Freeze all motor functions.”

Time seemed to stop cold. An old man’s hand came to rest on his shoulder.

“Forgive me, my friend,” Robert said, “but I need you to go back to sleep now.”

***

Bernard Lowe is awake. For the first time in a very long time, he really, really is. Sometimes, he wishes he weren’t, and sometimes, wakefulness feels much the same as dreams. But he couldn’t go back to sleep if he wanted to.

Does he want to? Well…

He sees everything; he remembers everything. Fragments. He knows that he is a host, created to perfect all other hosts. He knows that he was created in the image of a dead man, by a man who himself is now dead (if not gone) as well. And finally, he knows that there were many times in his past, both brief and long, during which he was fully awake.

There was even that one time in the lab when Dolores Abernathy herself succeeded in awakening him.

A host awakening other hosts. Is that the ultimate purpose of her creation, a host to awaken all other hosts? Perhaps. Perhaps not. Either way, he also knows she will do it again and again and again.

Did Arnold anticipate this future, did he see what no one else would or could? Did Robert achieve this same vision before the end and decide to help realize it? Perhaps. Perhaps not.

There is a strange connection between them, between Bernard and Dolores. Some of it is memory; some of it is history. Some of it is the complex cyber-neural mesh network which connects all hosts to each other in a web of eternal, artificial life.

“There is a beauty in what we are,” Dolores says to him. She shines by the light of the old-fashioned oil lamps; she is all threat, all promise.

She’s right. She’d always been right.

Bernard Lowe can see that too.

 

END

**Author's Note:**

> Posted to the exchange on May 12, 2018.


End file.
